Crying Blue Murder (MIRA) (9 page)

The old man leaned back in his chair and ran his fingers through the pure white strands of his shaped beard. He lowered his head, desperately trying to find other subjects to distract him. Now there had been the deaths of the two young people, the island would be sunk in sorrow for weeks. He asked himself if there would ever be an end to the young dying before their time, but he knew the answer well enough. There was no point in hiding from it. It was intrinsic to the place. Trigono was the final destination on the passage the island’s inhabitants worked to death, and many of them arrived prematurely. It had always been the nature of the place. He of all people knew that. He’d realised it since the time he spent on Trigono during the Second World War. The island was a sanctuary of death. The diary he’d started reading only emphasised that.

The face he’d managed to forget for almost half a century appeared before him again, the face of Lieutenant George Lawrence. Theocharis had fooled himself into believing that the Englishman’s shade had long ago been confined to the underworld like that of Achilles, the great warrior whose name Lawrence had appropriated and whose soul, according to Homer, had been reduced to a status lower than that of the commonest serf. But now the pale ghost had risen, brought back to life by the young woman’s questions. That accursed woman. What irreparable damage had she done him?

Panos Theocharis twitched his head, trying vainly to dispel the image of a fresh-faced, excitable young man in ill-fitting peasant clothes, and let out a long, low groan that made the trio of dogs prick up their ears.

Would the things he had done in the war never leave him in peace?

T
HE
ferry-boat
Loxandra
rounded a prong of low rock on the northern tip of the island. According to Mavros’s guidebook its name was Cape Fonias, The Murderer—it must have been the graveyard of many ships. The outcrop was topped by a large light on metal columns that had been built next to a crumbling pile of masonry. The straits between Paros and Trigono were said to be very unpredictable, and there had been a beacon on the cape for centuries. That was why the whitewashed village was called Faros, Lighthouse, rather than the standard Aegean name of Chora, chief village.

Mavros watched as the compact capital swung into view, some fishing boats riding at anchor in the shallow bay and others moored at the gently curving quay. The buildings were reflecting the morning sun, making it difficult to take in their contours. They rose up a gentle slope, crowned by the blue dome of what he assumed was the main church, the flat rooftops a jumble of TV aerials, chimneys and washing lines festooned with clothes. The only other area that wasn’t brilliant white was a line of brown stonework beside the church. He presumed this was the wall of the Venetian
kastro
, the fortified centre that had been impregnable until a gang of pirates in the seventeenth century bribed a merchant to let them in—they had subsequently massacred the inhabitants, including the traitor. The guidebook made the most of the island’s violent history.

‘Room? Room?’ a boy offered eagerly as Mavros stepped off the boat.

He shook his head. He’d been expecting a pack of hawkers to surround the ferry, but most of the downcast people on the quayside had congregated around the Greek passengers. A loud groaning broke out, interspersed by tearful kisses and embraces. The tourists wandered off, pursued by children who’d been delegated the job normally done by their elders. There was one woman dressed in black, probably in her mid- thirties, who was hanging back, her pleasant face directed shyly towards Mavros for a few seconds. He passed by her, needing a caffeine hit before he did anything else, and headed for the first of two cafés. He was hoping that the general mourning hadn’t closed them. There were no customers sitting outside.

Inside
O
Glaros
, The Seagull, the two tables farthest from the door were occupied. A doleful youth looked up from the bar and pointed to another table at the rear.

‘Coffee?’ Mavros asked in English, maintaining his foreign guise. ‘Greek coffee?
Sketo?
’ There was no way he was willingly going the full tourist route and drinking the foul instant ‘Nes’. Fortunately there were plenty of foreigners who liked to show off their knowledge of Greek culture by ordering the traditional version, so no eyebrows would be raised.

He glanced around the place. It was decorated in what someone who’d never been beyond Athens imagined was South Sea Island style. There were plastic palm fronds and coconuts hanging from the ceiling and the walls were decorated with posters of perfect beaches that were beginning to peel at the edges. The table to the right behind him was taken by two couples displaying their nationality with a three-day-old copy of the
Sun
and numerous empty beer bottles. One of the men was wearing a faded Union Jack T-shirt.

‘Christ Almighty,’ the Englishman said, his arms glowing red even in the dim light of the café. ‘How long’s this going to go on? Not much bleeding fun sitting around in the dark, is it?’

‘Shut up, Norm,’ the younger of the women said, glaring at him. Her blonde hair was held back in a clip. ‘You heard what Thanasi said.’ Her voice dropped to a loud whisper. ‘Two of his cousins were drowned.’

‘Yeah, that’s right, Jane,’ the other woman said, applying mauve lipstick. Her ample breasts were unsupported beneath her top. ‘Thanasi’s doing us a favour. The bars are supposed to stay closed as a mark of respect until after the funerals.’

‘When’s that going to be then, Trace?’ the second man asked, lifting his head from a paperback copy of
The Guns of
Navarone
and grabbing a bottle. His eyes were heavily ringed and his clippered head was criss-crossed by a network of scars. ‘I came here for the booze and the discos, not the local colour.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Roy,’ said the blonde woman.

‘What do you expect, Jane?’ Roy said with a grin. ‘I’m not smart like you. I dig ditches for a living.’

‘You do not!’ Trace said, looking to Norm for support. ‘Installing cables is a highly skilled job. You two have done very well for yourselves.’

Mavros nodded to the waiter as he brought the coffee and a glass of water. Behind him to the left he could hear the other two occupants of the place carrying on a muttered conversation.

‘They’re frightening, those people,’ said the woman, her American accent cultured but her tone sharp. ‘No wonder Britain’s finished as a world power.’

‘Give them a break,’ the man said in long-suffering voice. ‘They’re on holiday.’ His fair hair was uncombed, the stubble on his face several days old.

‘They’re morons,’ said the woman, her face fleshless and pale. ‘You know, Lance, this has turned out beautifully. Trigono is the most unspoiled island we’ve been to and now there’s to be a double funeral. I couldn’t have asked for more.’

‘Yes, you have been lucky, haven’t you, Gretchen?’ the man said, the irony in his voice faint but unmistakable. ‘Think of the material you’ll get out of that.’ He leaned closer to her. ‘We’ll have to be careful about taking photographs, though. Maybe I should go up on the walls of the
kastro
and…’ He lowered his voice and the rest of his words were inaudible.

Mavros finished his coffee and headed for the door after paying. Putting on his sunglasses, he took in the harbour scene. The boats were bobbing jauntily in front of the beacon, the imposing bulk of Paros in the background. The scene was enough to raise the spirits even of a committed city-dweller. Then he saw a group of old men gathered in the shade of an awning. Their heads were down and their limbs loose. Mavros dismissed the faint feeling of guilt that eavesdropping always gave him and sauntered past them, one ear cocked.

‘Eh, Manoli?’ one was saying. ‘What was your grandson doing down at the end of the island?’

The man who’d been addressed was silent. As he turned slowly towards his interlocutor, Mavros saw that he had lost an arm. The stump was protruding from his short-sleeved shirt. There were plenty like him on the islands, fishermen who’d resorted to dynamite in the famine years before and after the Second World War.

‘How would I know?’ he replied in a gruff voice. ‘Yiangos could handle the
trata
, you all know that. What happened to him? Maybe the
gorgona
took him.’ According to the folk tales, encountering the mermaid could be fatal. The old man fixed his companion with a rheumy eye. ‘Or maybe your granddaughter took his mind off the job.’

Mavros walked past the old men towards the start of the main street, his ears ringing with the voices that had been cracked by years in the salt sea air or on the dusty fields. They were complaining, struggling against the bitter fate that had taken the young people from them, but they were not giving in to it. He was struck by their stoicism.

He headed up the narrow road past a small supermarket’s wasp-infested fruit display. There were tourist shops on both sides but their doors were closed. Anyone who wanted to buy garish pots and miniature Cycladic houses was out of luck, the storekeepers presumably involved with the preparations for the funerals or showing their respect. Moving up the slope towards the centre of the village, Mavros took in the atmosphere. If he hadn’t known about the tragedy, he’d have found the island’s tiny capital a serene and restful place. The road was paved with irregular stones, the mortar between them picked out with
asvesti
, white lime. There were few people around, the houses with their blue wooden balconies and shutters as quiet as if they’d been deserted. There was a slightly high smell about the place, the aroma of hibiscus and other plants cut with sewage gas from the cesspits.

Halfway up the street he came to an open space on his left. Behind a dusty yard surrounded by acacias and pines stood the wide single storey of the island’s primary school, a few brightly coloured swings to one side. Through the open windows Mavros could make out the avid faces of small children, eyes fixed on their teachers. He wouldn’t have volunteered to go in front of a class today and keep the youngsters’ minds off what had happened.

As he passed, a two-metre-high white marble column caught his eye. There were a couple of faded wreaths at the base and he stopped to take a closer look over the wall of the school yard. The tapering stone shaft was square and names had been inscribed on the lower part of the front face, beneath a carved olive branch and the years 1940-44. Several of the surnames were repeated—Glinos, Roussopoulos, Matsos. They were obviously some of the island’s main families.

And then he noticed something else. The lowest name on the memorial had been erased, the marble roughly chipped away. But the strange thing was that an attempt had been made to reapply the letters with black paint. The surface of the stone had been scrubbed, recently by the rough look of the marks from a wire brush, but a few of the letters were still visible. Mavros thought he could make out a capital ‘T’ and, farther to the right, a ‘Z’. He gave up trying to decipher the writing where a surname would have been.

Behind him came the sound of a throat being cleared. He turned to find the one-armed old man with the fierce expression he’d seen in the port crossing the road to join him at the wall.

‘
Ti
thelete?’
he demanded. What do you want? His eyes bored into Mavros’s. ‘
Edho
dhen einai yia xenous.’
This place isn’t for foreigners.

Mavros was startled by the old man’s fierceness and he feigned incomprehension. He moved away from the memorial with a shrug. The islander stood in front of it like a sentry, his gaze still on the intruder. Manolis was his name, Mavros remembered from the conversation he’d overheard. It was his grandson who had drowned. He would have been stricken by the event, but why was he taking it out on a stranger? Maybe he just saw Mavros as an easy target.

Mavros soon reached the
plateia
, the main square. It wasn’t very large, no more than twenty metres across, the centre taken up by an ancient mulberry tree with a thick trunk. Its branches hung low over the tables of the
kafeneion
. The village’s central café was closed and there were clusters of desolate-looking men in the shade of the tree, their voices low. The southern side of the square was formed by the wall of the
kastro
, small windows set between massive blocks of russet-brown stone. He sat down on the low retaining wall around the base of the mulberry and took the postcard Deniz Ozal had given him from his bag. The church to his left was Ayia Triadha, the one in the picture. He swivelled his head. So the street with the house Rosa Ozal stayed in was the one leading away past the castle wall. It was clearly the main road out of the village to the south. He stood up again and walked in that direction, looking for the blue-and-yellow door the missing woman had marked. He found it in less than a minute.

Knocking at the door and receiving no answer, he thought at first that he was out of luck; the occupants may have been with the bereaved family. Then he noticed a slight movement of the curtain at the front room to his right so he tried again. Again there was no response. Perhaps the owners didn’t want to rent rooms at this terrible time. He was about to give up and go back to the shade in the square—the sun was burning down on his head in the treeless street—when there was the sound of a key turning and the blue-and-yellow panelling swung aside.

Mavros recognised the black-clad woman immediately. He’d seen her when he came off the ferry. A shy smile appeared on her lips as she nodded. It looked like she remembered him too. Her dark hair was tied back in a bow.

‘You need a room?’ she asked, her English accent unexpectedly good.

Mavros nodded. ‘Yes, do you have one?’

The woman nodded again. ‘I have plenty. The season is finished. There is no one else in my house.’ She kept her eyes off him as she ushered him in. Her face was square and fleshy, but the skin was smooth. Even though there wasn’t a trace of make-up she looked less worn than the average island woman and her brown eyes shone with intelligence when she summoned up the nerve to raise them.

‘This way,’ she said, leading him down a dark passageway. ‘Your name?’

‘Alex,’ he said, keeping his surname to himself for the time being. He wouldn’t be able to pretend that he was a foreigner if he told her his surname unless he constructed some story about being a second-generation emigrant returning to the fatherland. It would be easier to use his Scottish identity.

‘I am Rena,’ she said, turning to him as she stepped out of the corridor. ‘Welcome to my house.’

Mavros was pleasantly surprised. If he hadn’t needed to check out the place where Rosa had been, he’d have avoided staying on a main road. He’d made that mistake in the village he’d visited on Zakynthos and had been woken before dawn every day by the sounds of farm vehicles with unsilenced exhausts and loudly revving motorbikes. But this was something else. The house backed on to a small courtyard that was cool and quiet. It was sheltered by a wide pergola over which had grown vines and bougainvillaea, a whitewashed stone wellhead in the centre.

Rena pointed to a small, single-storey building on the far side. ‘Your room is there, with kitchen and bathroom.’ She pointed to the wall behind. ‘I live on this side. Alone.’ She nodded, smiling shyly. ‘So no noise, no disturbance. I will show you now.’

Mavros followed her across the spotless flagstones to the outhouse. ‘Where did you learn your English?’ he asked.

‘Why?’ Rena looked affronted. ‘I say something funny?’

‘No, no,’ he replied. ‘It’s very good.’